jason8612

Right now I have a Dell Venue 11 Pro. It's a tablet that has a keyboard docking station. It works well for traveling, but the battery life sucks. I get about 5.5hrs with the keyboard battery and the tablet battery combined.

I was looking into the Lenovo miix 700. It is lightweight, seems to have a great battery life, and similar or faster than what I have. Also passive cooling Vs the noisy fan the Dell has.

Does anyone have that Lenovo? Is there anything similar out there?

IsleOfMan

Sounds like you have the older Venue 11 Pro 7139 with i5 4300Y? Since you already have the Mobile Keyboard dock, I'd strongly consider just replacing it with the newer Broadwell Core M powered 7140 model. It's identical in form-factor but uses a much more power efficient (and not really any slower) Broadwell Core M chip with passive cooling, greatly improves battery life (6-8 hours stand-alone, 9-12 hours with dock), and is available for $229 refurb from A4C.com ($299 if you want the Keyboard Cover as well).

I'm personally not a big fan of kickstand devices (after having an original Surface Pro and still having an original Surface sitting on my kitchen counter for cooking, security camera checks, and reading emails/texts). My main complaint is using them on airplane tray-tables, with the kickstand constantly sliding off of the back of the tray table and just being generally unstable on anything but a flat table. However, if you do like the form factor, the Miix 700 and HP Spectre x2 12" are both solid budget alternatives to an entry-level Surface Pro 4.

echelon0911

The Dell XPS 13 and 15 computers are excellent. The XPS13 weighs almost nothing and bodes an impressive edge-to-edge display. So you achieve a 13" screen in a traditional 12" footprint. Same goes for the XPS 15 ... 15" display in a 14" footprint.

I've used a lot of Thinkpad, Dell and Vaio computers over the years and the XPS15 is arguably my all-around favorite machine. Plus it has one of the new USB-C ports. Battery life runs around 7 hours of realistic use.

jason8612

Thanks for the recommendation. Yeah, it's the older model. I ended up buying the miix 700 from Costco over the weekend. They had a $300 instant rebate ($800 for the 256gb version with the keyboard). I'll give it a try and if something, I can always return it back.

IsleOfMan

Seems pricey for the specs, outside of the screen resolution, compared to $229 for the newer Core M powered Venue 11 Pro. That said, put side-by-side with the entry-level Surface Pro 4 it emulated (and possibly exceeds) it actually doesn't seem like a bad value.

ou81two

Macbook. Load Windows on it if you want Windows. It breaks, you actually have somewhere to take it where they can service it.

jason8612

I've been playing around with it the past day and it seems to work well. The keyboard does feel sturdy and the all metal build does make it feel more durable.
I'll mess around with it some more and see what actual battery life I can get out of it.